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Work Group I: "Global Media and Ethics" global / media and / ethics. This short essay was worked over in order to ponder upon the discussions that arose during the intense media-workshop. Thus I changed the topic from "The global design process for the artificial city-island -Mirage City/Zhuhai, Hong Kong- and its impact on architecture" to a shorter but more speculative topic global / media and / ethics. In the following outlines the general title Global Media and Ethics was broken apart, reflecting the current fragmentised state of our environment, the pieces, bits and bites of meters, words, stocks, gridiron cities, and patchwork biographies. Elaborating on each term separately global /, media and /, and ethics, the remaining both other terms form the environment, in which reflections of meaning will be captured from the projection onto this word-constellation. Trained as an architect, meaning here to be concerned with the mental, physical, and virtual environment of man, I incorporated architecture with its defined project-character to help illustrate this complex topic. To keep it compact, I will stroll over a well explored terrain incorporating thoughts by Herbert Marshall McLuhan(1911-1980), the so called first media-philosopher, and speculate on their feasibility for the topic discussed here. McLuhan's main thesis argues that all media -regardless of the messages they are programmed to convey- exert a compelling influence on man's thinking and society. Media are an environmental matrix to man. Following this stream of thoughts, globalisation can be understood as the very appearance of an environmental change towards electronic media after the long predominance of print-media. quantity and quality. This must be said, the driving force behind global-anything is a market-economy of trade and information exchange, which in its quantifying nature is seeking to homogenise and synchronise the very diverse markets of the world. Nothing new in terms of trade and commerce, where the possible merits from them served as justification for undertakings like that of Marco Polo or Christopher Columbus firsthand. But the playground for its operations has been changed - other media. As McLuhan points out in his Gutenberg Galaxy: "Unless processed in a uniform way, it would be quite impossible to have delegation of functions and duties, and thus there could be no centralised national grouping as came into existence after printing. Without similar uniform processing by literacy, there could be no market or price system, a factor which constrains "backward" countries to be "communist", or tribal. There is no known means of having our price and distribution system without long and extensive experience of literacy. But we are swiftly becoming aware of these matters as we move into the electronic era." As "long and extensive" as the print-controlled market was in use, as long and indirect has been the physical way of feedback between the involved parties. The media (print) was bound onto similar means of transportation (ships, carriages) as the commodity itself. Therefore it could be said, that the sender-receiver line was mainly one-way, giving advantage to the sender (producer) because of temporal delay of the receiver's (customer) feedback. The main techno-economical issue was a mechanical one. Here a crucial point in the program of exchange has altered. By shortening the feedback structure through media like telegraph, telephone, and now the Internet, sender-receiver can act simultaneously and can be exchanged for each other. In other words, the exchange will shift from quantified values fostered by print and needed to bridge over the mechanical time delay between sender and receiver (to ensure the fair exchange and to avoid ambiguity) to more quality based values. Values of quality are the equivalent to culture, whereas print-affected quantification has its technical complement in civilisation. Because of electronic simultaneity, the receiver and his environment will have bigger influence on the product. The almost simultaneous feedback structures in electronic media and its very incarnation in the Internet can only achieve real customer-driven economy. It can be understood as the economical bias of need, irrelevant where it is induced from. For sender and receiver are immediately reversible, lineal assembly lines will be bend into feedback-circuits. Suchlike proximity fosters cultural encounters with all the controversial potential normally kept by printing culture (the language of the absent) in secure distance. Was print a mechanical tool of distinction and thereby quantification - trains, airplanes, and cars can be seen as logically processed from this origin. This is not so with the electronic tool-set of today. Did economic activities reach their most advanced EX-tent into worldwide markets with the mechanical tool-set - electronics do not go further but "deeper". Suchlike electronic IN-tensification will result in direct almost face-to-face/ body-to-body encounters with the very impact and values of other cultures. De-distant encounters can only be understood by outside or environmental factors. In that way de-distance makes the electronically exposed people aware of their own environment (feedback), regardless if it is garden, family, house, cyberspace, highway or city. De-distancing has its synonymous in qualification. Going a step further into this field of thoughts, qualification was always bound to education. Here this can be seen as the comprehensive understanding of culture through its environmentally mediated factors. The shift towards electronic media triggers the reinstitution of qualities after the long bias of the visual sense and uniform quantities during print. McLuhan writes here: "The reduction of the tactile qualities in life and language constitute the refinement sought in the Renaissance and repudiated now in the electronic age." This reinstitution of interplay of all senses in the electro-organic multimedia will open up our spectrum for cultural perception and confrontation, which can be characterised as the encounter of bodies - the cultural projections on skin. time and space of media. Different media will certainly be recognisable in their influence on the balance of space and time in the human environment. Hinting on architecture, the basic differentiation are outlined by Harold Innis in Empire and Communications "Media which emphasise time are those which are durable in character such as parchment, clay, and stone.... Media which emphasise space are apt to be less durable and light in character such as papyrus and paper." Concluding this statement, it could be argued that electronic media while being easy to manipulate and therefore not durable, are very much about space - the information or the formed thing. But, here we would miss that change or deformation is the basic transition for information, necessary to process new information - the thing that is not formed yet. Deformation resembles the very concept of time. Thus the introduction of electronic media emphasise as much space as it do emphasise time, a blend to be called space-time. Thereby it takes into account the twofold etymological character of the terminus "information": -the in-formed, without form (informis, lat.) -the informed, to bring in form, forming, formed (informo, lat.) Both first paragraphs implements the global / media and / ethics configuration into tendencies that particularly emphasise qualities -that, what cannot be measured but sensed-, and into the very complex of space-time manipulations -the change of environment over a period of time-. It is a general and rough layout, but it provides the main canvas on which the following explanations for an environmental programming will be stuck onto. global media...: environ-mental reflections "We live for the most part within enclosed spaces. These form the environment from which our culture grows. Our culture is in a sense a product of our architecture. If we wish to raise our culture to a higher level, we are forced for better or for worse to transform our architecture. And this will be possible only if we remove the enclosed quality from the spaces within we live." Paul Scheerbart, Glas architecture, chapter I. The environment and its influence on the evolution of culture; Berlin 1914 (Paul Scheerbart (1863-1915) was a German expressionist writer who especially in the last three years of his life articulated his long-held convictions on the power of architecture and its relationship to the modern world in his fictional narratives.) global / In a lecture Saskia Sassen, the now University of Chicago based sociologist working on the phenomena of globalisation, pointed out that value in global markets are mainly created by the main business of the nation/ region/ spot. This first quantified and money based business is succeeded by mainly four other so called second businesses, which are specialised in serving the first: legal services law services finance services advertisement. As third or fourth would follow businesses like architecture, arts, fashion-design, gastronomy, etc., as long as they do not form the main business. Lined up, all business that is transforming countable value into qualitative, experience-able value would follow the quantifying, calculable main business. It becomes necessary here to differentiate two versions of global-ness. First is the earlier mechanically achieved one, which concludes in its highest acceleration of the human body - jet plane propelled exchange. The later one took over the function of open up "new" markets from the "jetties" and switch over to an electrified environment of telegraph, telephone, TV, fax, and computer networks. Why that? Extension of markets reach its limits when tanker, trains, jets, trucks, and cars could not approach the bodies of potential customers closer. "Body" serves here as a metaphor for the representation of cultural values projected on skin, textiles, plaster, walls, ground like streets, or on canvas. Is it just a problem of scale? The first markets were recorded as measurements/ quantification/ inventories like in topographic, demographic or city mappings. Those markets were mostly bound on new technology to neutralise distance and reaching quickly new territory while transgressing borders indifferent to culture. As shown in the paragraphs above the later markets are reached by intensifying and thereby deepening the relation to groups, societies and other culturally bound communities. Indispensably it has to deal with their very qualitative values, evoking irritations that can be observed in newspaper columns daily. Thus the market-operations have to be conceived as engagement in the environment of potential customers. Here it becomes quite clear that electrified business is an environmental business. Because of its manmade character it can't be taken for granted like topographic environment was taken during mechanically propelled business. Therefore each undertaking has to be projected as a comprehensive, culture-feedback operation. -Global- as term implies something round, therefore globalisation something that operates cyclically. This is conform to the ambiguity in what is first there independently to what creates the "first" value. The notorious question -what's the first?- can be avoided by following the implicated "roundness" in the term -global-. Because here the transformation from quantified to qualified values goes on back and forth. Those movements result in value adding and losing systems, bringing commodities into revolving order. Most significantly the re-cycling guided market is clearly expressed in the omnipresent re-introductory techniques of archaeology, etymology, material recycling, internet-bidding-markets like ebay.com, retro-design, -old fashioned- labelling, antique-isation, and Kitsch. By bringing count-able and experience-able values in electro-economical proximity and making them immediately exchangeable blurs the old notion of first and second value or first and second business. As good illustration can serve the economic success of the -tamagochi-, an egg-shaped toy conceptualised in Asia with an electronic pet on a small screen. The pet has unlimited lives, each depending on the care given over play-buttons to it. This very Buddhist concept of cyclic life fascinated the western world lastingly, where the ultimate Christian notion of one life for creatures dominates. Made for children it would have terrible consequences if this concept would be transferred into the real world of living pets. Nevertheless, the economically quantified difference was a quality in the approach to life firsthand, exemplifying the immediate exchangeability of those values. Global-anything will gain a more comprehensive project-character in-between electronically approaching environments, where especially cyclic techniques for re-introducing qualitative values will play an upgrading role. media and / Architectural thinking as environmental discipline is undergoing a deep electro-transformation. It can be stated without doubt that architecture is a global phenomenon, but in how far is it media? Firstly, the rather stereotyped McLuhan paradigm "The Medium is the Message" will be briefly considered. The modernistic motto "Form follows Function" introduced by the Chicago architect Luis Sullivan in the late 19th Century is proven wrong. Good illustrations for that are the very symbols of Modernity - high-rise structures, developed in the same period as the motto. This to a considerable extent in Chicago developed building type principally conceals all functions by cutting off the facade from inner programs. Almost every function is practically transferable into their uniform volumes. Here architecture became not the message of itself but rather the very medium. The "naked" and excessively stripped down architectonic structure of today's highriser buildings clarified the "will to architecture" to be absorbed by the "will to (economic) power". Secondly McLuhan stated " ...all media, from the phonetic alphabet to the computer, are extensions of man that cause deep and lasting changes in him and transform his environment." Any artificial (medial) physical environment created is a species of architecture, whether it is called landscape design, urban design, or interior design. Even the virtual environments are very much influenced by architectural organisation. This "extension of man" could more precisely labelled as a "simulation of man" wherein for example the tooth is the model for the knife, the computer is an simulation of the brain and nerves, and finally architecture is the simulation of man's skin. This skin is a remarkable one, because unlike the naturally given one, this one can be manipulated and thereby project roles onto ourselves, which means here throwing our claim for a specific role in our environment ahead into the future. Then this role will approach the sender through others by time, making him a receiver. Thus architecture can provide a future environment that already contains the memory of us - the base for the intended change of information about ourselves, which could be regarded as projected feedback. In other words, projected feedback is the instant feature being crucial in determination of what the new television-media are. This must be said, changing information is contented in the very process of communication - messages being sent and received almost simultaneously. Both terms can be related quite closely to what the skin's nature is: a mediating membrane to wrap and embed the sensual instruments and to give a distinctive shape and permeable surface to a body. This is what architecture itself makes foremost a media, providing models for shaping bodies of knowledge, of communities, companies, families, and others. The historical body has been one, where memories have been inscribed. Architectural bodies have always served as manifested record for their time. Thus human thinking was subjected to technologies that can inscribe records into things. The technologies of engraving (into soil, stone or metal), casting, layering (wood, stone to walls), threading (pages, moveable letters in print), weaving (textiles as manipulated skin), etc. can serve as instances for that. Generally, we accepted this as the very reason for all the incredible artworks we can appreciate and study in our museums. They serve as prototypes to reveal cultures of earlier times to today's eye. Here it could be argued that originally having taken mostly stereotyped things as prototypes that were filtered by hundreds of years, with our current computer technology, we reach the state of instant prototyping. Hence the shaping of each design is the ultimate translation of its very environmental conditions in time and space. It could be called a past-historical approach, since long spans of time and of (hi-)story-making are not longer necessary filters to form prototypes. With the concept of electronic memory and their in-formative character, bodies has been released from their historic mission. Electronic databases are much more efficient than all systems incorporated beforehand. This opens up the architectural discipline to be a truly projective one, metaphorically, by designing feedback on people in advance, literally, by introducing the cathode ray tube and its successors in the planning process. The cathode ray tube, first experimented with by the artist Nam Jun Paik in video art in the early 60 last century, is the predecessor of today's computer-controlled and -animated projection. The manipulated screen and with it the simulative animation of the environment came into the daily execution of the architectural discipline, which shut it off from the historically grounded "will to architecture" as shown above. McLuhan outlined his motivation: "I want to map new terrain rather than chart old landmarks.", which hints to what media and thereby also architecture have to re-work: the mapping of the environment, today truly a discipline of digital cameras, video-screens, satellites, and computer-animations/ -networks. Marshall McLuhan categorised media into "hot" and "cold" media. The hot is characterised by high definition but low participation, the cold as low resolution with required high participation. Following this line of thought, architecture would be a cold media. "...,television is primarily an extension of the sense of touch rather than of sight, and it is the tactile sense that demands the greatest interplay of all the senses." Here it has to be outlined that architecture was always besides sculpturing the most tactile of all disciplines, inclusive to sound, smell, touch, and sight. Architects do so with their visual image manipulation in their very computer screen-work environment of today. But whilst screens allow just visual interpretations by sight, computers are "blinds" interpreting constellations by incorporating many factors like colour, angle, relation, dimensions, sound etc. - so to say super-tactile and beyond mere rationality. It is a mistake to understand computer just as MHz-propelled accelerators of visualisation and thereby of rationalisation, even tough they belong to the realm of television-media. Concluding it could be speculated that the "global" character of environment becomes obvious by identifying all new global media as televisional extensions, which as shown before belong to the tactile group and thus being impacted with the very nature of architecture. In respect to the paragraph -global /-, media as environmentally active condition are to be positioned very close to the architectural discipline, as well as global economics will find in architectural tactics (here from tactile) models of how to approach the more and more project-like undertakings today. ethics. No medium can be limited to a set of values, since the content can be disconnected from the medium itself. However, media can favour certain conditions for values, depending on the cultural environment, surely far away to give space directly to very defined sets like moralistic or ethical values. McLuhan "Print is the technology of individualism. If men decided to modify this visual technology by an electric technology, individualism will also be modified. To raise a moral complaint about this is like cussing a buzz-saw for lopping off fingers. "But," someone says, "we didn't know it would happen." Yet even witlessness is not a moral issue. It is a problem; and it would be nice to clear away some of the moral fogs that surround our technologies. It would be good for morality." Architecture as environmental approach to reality becomes by its media-character more and more a provider of conditions for activities rather than the activity itself. Such opportunity-creating architecture can be found in the metaphorical term "acoustic space" coined by McLuhan. He writes "Acoustic space is organic and integral, perceived through the simultaneous interplay of all senses;..." and describes it as syn-aesthetic (many senses including), simultaneous and discontinuous, or in short as "rich". Architecture as a technological extension shares with man a relationship similar man has to other technologies, forming with them as type of operator-apparatus functional unit (after Vilem Flusser (1920-1991)). McLuhan "Man's relationship with his machinery is thus very symbiotic. This has always been the case; it's only in the electric age that man has an opportunity to recognise this marriage to his own technology." As likely as other media, architecture is a provider of conditions, thus being total and all-inclusive, it gives rise to the idea of directing the development of ethical values by the very environment. The above briefly circumscribed tendencies to environmental qualification gives a clear hint to its educational impact. Inferring from the outlined environmental aspects in electrified economics and culture, such tactics seem to be able to integrate almost all of human activities. We should project onto it. Christopher Knabe Chicago in November 1999/ January 2000 If not otherwise indicated, all quotations are taken from: "The Playboy interview: Marshall McLuhan" interviewed by Eric Norden, March 1969 and "The Gutenberg Galaxy" by Marshall McLuhan, University of Toronto Press 1962 |